Joe GuzzardiAs a Wall Street veteran, I support the protests there

Forty years ago, during the height of the Vietnam War, I worked
on Wall Street. Every day at lunch time, the hawks faced off
against the doves. The demonstrations often turned ugly; fistfights
were common.

While I don’t condone violence, either then or now, I am 100
percent in support of the current uprising staged on my old
stomping grounds against corporate greed, self-serving politicians,
unemployment and the variety of other valid reasons that have
spawned popular dissent.

In recent days, union members, including nurses and teachers,
have joined the nationwide ranks of the discontent.

“Our workers are excited about this movement. The country has
been turned upside down,” said United Federation of Teachers
President Michael Mulgrew. Closer to home in San Francisco, several
hundred marched around the financial district, chanting, “They got
bailed out, we got sold out” and “Join our ranks, stop the
banks.”

If I still lived in New York, I’d be right there in lower
Manhattan, too. Almost every American except for the Wall Street
and Capitol Hill crowds have been adversely impacted by some form
of corporate malfeasance or political lobbying that works against
the common good. Millions of Americans were victimized by the
housing crisis wherein the home equity they had built up over years
vanished within months.

Many are to blame. Start with George W. Bush, whose idea it was
to boost minority home ownership by 5.5 million units. In the
process, he and the banks, who smelled a killing, eliminated down
payments.

Mortgage and Wall Street investment bankers, knowing that
deregulated markets would allow them to get away with outrageous
abuses, loaned money at sub-prime rates to the marginally employed
and offered deferred payments to borrowers who could barely scrape
together meal money. In one case documented by the New York Times
in its five-part series about the mortgage meltdown, a California
worker with an annual income of less than $15,000 purchased a
$450,000 home.

The end result: The economy came within a hair of collapsing.
Luckily for the bankers, the federal government, whose Treasury
Department was headed by Goldman Sachs executives, bailed out the
banks — but not the little people.

Consider this: At the time Merrill Lynch collapsed under the
weight of its own criminal actions, the Chief Executive Officer was
Stanley O’Neal. On his watch, Merrill in 2007 took a $16 billion
quarterly write-off and eventually entered into a distressed sale
deal with the Bank of America. Through his negligence, O’Neal
single handedly bankrupted one of Wall Street’s most venerable
firms, which dated back to 1914 and once managed $1.8 trillion in
customer assets. He should be in jail. Instead, O’Neal is playing
golf somewhere in paradise while he lives in luxury off the
proceeds from his $250 million golden parachute.

Most Americans realize that the corrupt political system has
marginalized them into nothingness. The idea that the United States
is a democracy is only true in the strictest sense of the word. As
we learned in civics class, your vote is indeed equal to mine. The
problem is that neither of them count for much.

With luck, the movement playing out on Wall Street today will be
as effective as the Vietnam protests of years ago. At the least,
collective political action will help raise awareness that, I hope,
could lead to tangible changes.

Joe Guzzardi retired from the Lodi Unified School District
in 2008. He blames Republicans, Democrats, bankers and lobbyists
for the lingering economic crisis. Contact him at
guzzjoe@yahoo.com